


Resident Hunter

by cornheck



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Nonbinary Kurapika (Hunter X Hunter), Other, heavily inspired and influenced by Grey's Anatomy, will contain written depictions of blood/injury/surgery/etc.
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 13:08:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18638743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cornheck/pseuds/cornheck
Summary: With medical school behind him, Leorio Paladiknight begins his residency at a Mercy Grace General Hospital in York New City.





	Resident Hunter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On his first day at Mercy Grace General Hospital, Leorio meets the people he'll be spending the rest of his residency with.

The mornings in York New City are an ordeal of their own to grow used to. Despite all his good fortune, enough to live up the block from the nearest subway station, Leorio paced the short length of his bedroom hours before his alarm was set to go off. It had no window, his bedroom, and was so comparable to a dorm, in its plain and barely-furnished state, that when he awoke in the middle of the night to the sound of blaring sirens in the streets below, he nearly thought he’d dreamed the past four years and somehow managed to wake up as a first-year in medical school. Checking his phone gave him reassurance enough that his nerves had only deceived him. Today was still his first day as an intern and he hadn’t slept more than four hours—orientation wouldn’t be for another three.

In the confines of a hospital, time passes awkwardly; it’s twisted and obliterated by the glare of fluorescent lights reflecting off linoleum floor tiles and the shrill beeping of pagers all hours of the day. The hospitals of a city that never sleeps seem immune to the arbitrary boxes of a calendar grid, and still they thrive on them. From schedules to appointments to shift changes and times of death, the systems of the hospital are always moving. Each new year, fresh batches of medical school graduates begin their journeys anew as first-year residents, diving headfirst into the ever-turning cycle of the machinations of a hospital. On the upper west side of York New City, along with a handful of others, Leorio Paladiknight begins life after medical school as a first-year resident at Mercy Grace.

He arrived early, though he had made an attempt to force himself back to sleep. At the moment he began to feel lost, Leorio was thankful to spot the apparent makings of a tour group. He hesitated, one step away, but nudged a pair of figures in front of him, “Hey,” he began, “Are you interns, too?”

One of them, a young woman clutching a hospital ID, turns to him. “Yeah,” she says, then glances him over. Under her breath, to avoid the attention of the speaker at the front, she whispered, “Do you know whose service you’re on?”

Leorio leans down to respond, at the same hushed volume. “Doctor Petra Terro,” he replied. Even from the back of the small crowd, at his height, it was easy to get a good look at the guide: a well-groomed man who appeared to be nearing his sixties wearing his white coat over a dress shirt and tie, muttering to himself as he flips through the papers on his clipboard.

“You lucked out, then,” she replies, “We’re on Terro's service, too. I think all of us are.” The other intern looks forward again for a moment, studying the older man at the head of the group, then back at Leorio, “I’m Arin Parsa,” she whispered, extending a hand.

He obliges the greeting, shaking her hand, “Nice to meet you,” he answers, reciprocating, "Leorio Paladiknight."

"What a name," she remarks. "Nice to meet you, too, Leorio. I expect we're going to be spending a lot of the next foreseeable year with each other... might as well make some friends."

"Sounds like a good plan," he replies. “Say… who’s that guy up front?” Leorio asks, watching now as he finally shuffled all his papers into a clean stack, tucking them into a file folder neatly under his arm.

“That’s Yuey Karim,” she explains without prompting, “He’s the Mercy Grace chief of surgery,” Arin looks back up at the chief, who he was surprised to see moving down the hallway, motioning for the interns to follow him.

As the small herd of other doctors shuffle after Doctor Karim, Leorio looks to Arin, “He seems a little…”

“Lost?” she interrupts his hesitant comment with an assertion of her own, “I’ve been told he’s a little eccentric.”

For a moment, the pace began to pick up and Leorio thought back to the start of the hunter exam he’d taken years ago. Laughing discretely to himself as they moved through the hospital corridors, maneuvering ever-closer to the surgical auditorium, his chuckling catches Arin’s attention.

“Laughing at Karim?” she asks.

“No, actually,” Leorio sighs, “This reminds me of when I took the Hunter Exam,” he smiles, looking at Arin’s now-astonished expression.

“Really? You took the Hunter Exam?” she whispers, making a desperate urge not to call attention to them. “Did you pass?” Arin presses him for answers, the grin on her face and sparkle in her eyes telling him all he needed to know about the kind of impression such an admission was already making on his reputation at Mercy Grace.

His smile widens, “Yeah, I did,” he says, still walking quickly to keep up with the rest of the interns, lagging behind to give himself room to talk. It seemed as though Arin didn’t mind being a fellow straggler, and he wasn’t too worried, himself, about the fact that they’d ignored whatever it was that Doctor Karim had said before.

“No way,” she gasps, then promptly hushes herself. “Prove it,” Arin retorts, reaching out to nudge Leorio’s arm with the back of her hand, “Show me your license!”

He glances ahead, first, then digs into the hidden breast pocket of his jacket lining, looking to Arin to meet her gaze as he cups it in his hands and flashes it at her waiting eyes. She looks just as wowed as before. Perhaps she never doubted the validity of it in the first place, but the novelty of knowing a licensed Hunter was alluring enough. She takes a good look at it and the stunning, graphic Xs on its front before he tucks it away again, looking back at her with a renewed confidence all the sleep in the world couldn’t have helped him achieve before his first shift.

“Wow,” Arin remarks. “So, do you know Sanbica Norton?”

“The virus hunter?” he asks.

“-And surgeon, yes,” Arin affirms.

He snickers at her enthusiasm, “We met once, only briefly—at the last election for chairperson of the Hunter Association,” Leorio answers, though it doesn’t quite satiate her curiosity.

“Is that what you want to become, a virus hunter?” she queries.

“Well, no,” Leorio groans. “If I wanted to become a virus hunter, I’d simply be one. I only got a hunter’s license to pay for medical school,” he shrugs. They keep walking forward, following Doctor Karim, the halls growing narrower. The interns hadn’t yet run into anyone else during their tour. Being as early in the morning as it was, no one else was roaming the surgical wing, operation rooms all lining one side of the hall while the entrances to the auditoriums lined the other.

“That must come in handy,” Arin mutters. “I think the rest of us will be paying back loans until we’re eighty.”

“Well, hey,” Leorio says, “Now that we’re residents, at least we’ve got a job.”

She smiles, though it’s stressed and flat, reassured. Maybe he and his optimism had a point, but they were only interns. Job security meant absolutely nothing to a misfit gaggle of first-year residents, no matter how gifted they all had to have been in order to land a spot in the program.

Their long walk through the hospital’s halls gave him time to collect names, at the least. With Arin’s help, he gathers that the intern walking beside them is Hora Bex, the intern with dark tan skin and eyes set on a residency as a trauma surgeon. He can already tell she’s got resolve to rival his own without a question, her expression hard like a tempered steel scalpel, though she smiles softly at Arin and Leorio upon their brief and mutual introduction. She and Arin get along quickly, teaming up to decipher the identities of the other interns in their midst.

At the front of the pack marched Bunny Wen, a petite woman with the speedy gait of her namesake. According to Arin, she was angling to specialize in neurosurgery. For a moment, Leorio wonders if it’s a nickname—though Doctor Wen would suffice in addressing her regardless of her first name, he figures. Behind Bunny, Juno Kresh sauntered with long steps, his eyes fixed forward. To Hora’s understanding, Kresh was undecided. A wildcard, Leorio thinks. Then, there’s Jeska Orso, who wants to specialize in pediatrics whether it's surgically or not. The last one, Rigor Gaines, is harder to decipher. As far as Arin and Hora knew, Gaines was here to specialize in plastics. He certainly does walk with ostentatious steps, Leorio remarks to himself.

When their pace finally slows, the group stops short of the door which leads into the last surgical auditorium, the room open and as Leorio peeked in through the threshold. It's empty, except for two doctors standing beside each other, as Yuey Karim ushers the mass of fresh faces into the barren operating room.

Doctor Karim speaks again, and this time Leorio and Arin can make out his words clearly. They’re unmistakable. “Each of you comes today hopeful, wanting in on the game. Just a few short months ago you were in med school, being taught by doctors. Today, you are the doctors,” he steps toward the other two in lab coats, lining himself up in front of the interns who began to wander the room.

Another speaks up, “The years you spend here as a resident will be the best and worst of your life,” says one of them, a woman with red hair tucked back into a bun. “You will be pushed to the breaking point.”

“Look around you and say hello to your competition,” says the last one; a tall man with his hands in his lab coat, thumbs anchored on the outsides of his pockets. “Any one of you will switch to an easier specialty, crack under the pressure, or be asked to leave by the time you pass your board exam,” he cocks a brow.

“This is your starting line,” Karim continues, “This is your arena. How well you play, that's up to you.” He crosses his arms in front of his chest, bringing his wristwatch close to his face. “If you’ll excuse me, however, I’ll leave introductions to Petra Terro and Okan Ray,” Karim clears his throat. “Give ‘em hell, doctors,” he grins, slipping back out the door and down the hall.

As soon as he left, the red-headed woman adjusted the lapel of her coat, a clipboard full of tan file folders resting in one arm at her side. “I’m Doctor Petra Terro, fourth-year resident of Mercy Grace’s unique and integrated program, and I’ll be the one you report to for the rest of your intern year,” she smirks.

“And I’m Doctor Ray,” said the other. The pretension of importance in his tone makes Leorio cringe, one corner of his mouth upturned. He’s barely spoken but, already, Okan reminds him of Ging Freecss. He has to remind himself not to make a face as he continues. “I’m an attending general surgeon,” the doctor chuckles, “but I trust Doctor Terro to keep you all in line. I’ve met enough of you interns in my years to know when to stay out of your way.” He laughs to himself again and holds up a hand as he, too, takes his exit. “Look for me if you really need me, but I’ve got a feeling you all can handle yourselves.” He waved again, and Leorio thought he’d caught a wink from the man, before ducking out.

“He’s only half-right,” Doctor Terro asserts, “I’m still your resident and you’re all still interns .” Her smirk flattens and she begins walking, cutting between Juno and Bunny on her way to the door. Though Hora and Arin start to follow on her trail, Doctor Terro doesn’t bother looking behind her to beckon the rest of them after her, “Try to keep up.”

They all hustle to keep up. Leorio already finds it hard to remain unfazed after so few hours of sleep, practically running on fumes. Doctor Terro turned a corner and continued to speak.

“I have five rules,” she says, “Memorize them.” Now the group picks up its pace in order to hear her. Despite her warm welcome, it would seem that she’s not one to repeat herself. “Don't bother sucking up, I made up my mind about all of you from the moment I saw you and that's not going to change,” she sighs, her voice clear, loud enough that Leorio can hear her perfectly from the back of the herd. Slowing her pace, Terro gestures to a padded gurney in the hall before them lined with seven sets of items; some equipment and different-colored index cards laminated and collated together in a stack. “Trauma protocol, phone lists, pagers, and keycard,” she rattled off as she began walking again.

Leorio scooped up the last remaining set, pocketing the protocol cards and phone lists with the pager and keycard in his free hand.

“Nurses will page you, and when they do, you run. Don’t walk, run, that's rule number two," Terro tilts her head to the side, seeming to get a look at her interns in the corner of her eye. "Your first shift starts now and lasts forty-eight hours,” she says, turning around as she walks backwards to make eye contact with all of them.

Leorio is silent, though he hears Juno Kresh groan beside him.

“You are interns, grunts, nobodies from bottom of the hospital food chain; you run labs, write orders, work every second night until you drop and I don't want to hear you complaining,” she says, continuing her hasty tour and turning back around to lead them forward. Cutting down another corridor, Terro swung open a plain door, flipping on the light switch and standing to the side to let each of them catch a glimpse at the inside of the room. “These are the on-call rooms. Attendings and residents will hog them, so sleep whenever and wherever you can,”

Under his breath, Leorio mutters, “Thank God.”

“You’ve got hospital donors and the residency program to thank for those, not God,” she quips, catching his quiet words, shutting the door and turning off the light to restore the room as she continues, “Which brings me to rule number three... if I'm sleeping, don't wake me unless your patient is actually dying. Rule number four, your dying patient better not be dead when I get there. Not only will you have killed someone, you’ll have disturbed me for absolutely no good reason, are we clear?” She slows to a stop in the middle of a hall which overlooks an actual wing on the first floor. Doctor Terro turns to see Leorio, Arin, Hora, Bunny, Juno, and Rigor nodding in understanding.

They’d now walked in a full circle from where they started, Leorio recognizing the central information desk from the beginning of their short tour. Leorio hesitantly raises his hand, Doctor Terro pointing at it as quickly as he’d held it up.

“Yes,” Terro prompts, 

“You said you had five rules,” Leorio notes with confusion, “That was only four.”

The sudden and incessant beeps of the resident’s pager, though it appears to distract her, nearly answers his question all on its own. “Rule number five,” she says, holding up a finger as she reads the page, “If I move, you move-” she breathes in, sharply, and cuts herself off, turning away from them and pocketing her pager as she runs.

Though they’re all hesitant, Jeska, Rigor, Hora, and Arin rush forward as Leorio tries to keep up with Bunny and Juno following closely behind him.

“Move!” Terro shouted, navigating around the early-morning nurses who veer out of her path, “Out of my way- out of my way!” The interns shuffle after her, Leorio running to catch up with Arin and Hora leading the rest of them on Terro’s tail.

He looks to Arin, sucking in a breath as he ran, surprised by her stamina. “How d’you run like that without breaking a sweat?”

Arin grins. “Cross country running, every year of middle school, high school-” she takes a pause to breathe, “and all four years of undergrad.”

“Man-” he pants, “This really is just like the Hunter Exam.”

“Ha!” She laughs with heavy breaths, “If all I have to do is run to get a Hunter’s License, I really ought to take this test. I've won marathons, you know.”

“Oh, sure, you say that now,” he laughs with her, “Just wait ‘till you’re running for hours n’ hours on end through a dark tunnel… and everyone running beside you is thinking of the best way to cut you out of the race,” Leorio cautions, his eyes still following Doctor Terro’s back as she shepards them toward the ambulance bay.

“So,” Arin retorts, “Just like med school.”

The jest has Leorio smiling but his grin fades as quickly as they stop behind Doctor Terro. They watch as an ambulance pulls around the back end of the hospital, sirens blaring—ripping across the Tarmac and screeching to a halt so close to the emergency doors that Leorio flinches.

The doors fly open with a kick, two paramedics hurrying out the back of the vehicle and dragging a gurney with them. Upon it lay a figure in a Stifneck collar and securements strapped across the chest.

“What’ve we got?” Terro asks, her voice piercing through the sound of the ambulance sirens and the clatter of metal legs that unfurl from beneath the gurney.

“Ren Hanon,” began the paramedic to her left, pushing their way through the emergency room doors. “Unconscious sixteen-year-old female, head trauma and deep puncture wounds—fell down the stairs at home while her parents were renovating- landed on several nails and construction staples,” he says, "Her parents are on the way."

Terro’s gaggle of interns are quick to part before them, jogging after the gurney one by one to keep from crowding their resident. Leorio finds himself able to cut up to the front, running beside the other paramedic who held a gloved hand over deep wounds all along the patient’s side, rusty metal tips of the aforementioned nails sticking up out of her flesh and punctured muscle like spines on a cactus. He can’t help but wince inwardly at the sight.

The most he’d done before today in regards to actual procedures on living, breathing people consisted of drawing blood and giving vaccines—and even then, he was poking his own colleagues with needles. They knew what to expect, they were doctors in training, but this poor girl probably never saw this coming. At the snappy sound of Doctor Terro’s voice, Leorio is drawn from his moment of internal doubt.

“Alright, interns, what’s the first plan of action?” Terro asks.

“Get a CT scan to check the head trauma,” Hora answers immediately, cutting through the rest of them as they pull the patient into an exam room. The paramedics excuse themselves to hurry back to their ambulance, brushing past the nurse in dark red scrubs who slips in behind all of them to take Terro’s commands.

"What about the foreign objects, what if this girl has internal bleeding?" Leorio can't help but ask.

Bunny Wen clears her throat, "What if she has a brain bleed? The head comes first. I say we move her to get a CT," she huffs.

“CTs are down,” the nurse interjects.

“What?” Terro’s brows furrow, “Since when?”

“The computers crashed so we had them exchanged last night," they add. "I.T. says they’ll be back up and running by one o’clock.”

“Typical,” Terro sighs, “What are our options, people?”

Juno raises his hand but speaks without prompting anyway, “An MRI?”

Doctor Terro lifts a hand to her head, pinching the bridge of her nose in frustration, “No-”she groans.

Rigor snickers, “Brilliant,” he says, “The girl’s got nails and staples in her side, let’s stick her in a giant magnet... We’ll want films from three axis points and a C-arm in surgery.”

“Excellent,” Terro praises. “Gaines, I want you on Ren Hanon’s case. The rest of you- ” she continues, wielding her finger to point at them, “Get on bloodwork and labs,” she instructs. Standing around for a moment, Terro shook her head and snaps her fingers, “Now, please-”

Leorio and Arin scramble as the, now, two nurses beside them hand them prepped butterfly needles, the sound of water rushing from the faucet and vinyl gloves snapping on the skins of the interns' hands filling the room. Everyone, with the exception of Rigor Gaines, gingerly handles Ren’s arms at either side of her while Gaines flips through the file folder Doctor Terro hands off to him on her way out. His cocky expression appears to fade under the pressure of it all, breathing heavily and turning pages as his eyes dart from Ren to her chart.

“Stay sharp, rookies,” Terro warns, turning back toward them one last time, “Your first forty-eight hours are going to be Hell on Earth.”

After a rapid-fire round of delegation from Hora, Leorio draws two vials of Ren’s blood for testing and looks wearily up at the clock on the wall. Eight-nineteen in the morning. It's about to be a long two days at Mercy Grace General.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not plagiarism if you cite what you quote... I pulled a lot of this dialogue (from the residents and chief) from Grey's Anatomy's first episode, "A Hard Day's Night" as well as "No Man's Land" (for this chapter) and will continue to do this for as long as I'm writing this fic because I'm writing it for myself and no one else... but you're welcome along for the ride even if you don't like Grey's Anatomy! It's inspired by the show, not a crossover, so I'm sorry if anyone was expecting an appearance from Christina Yang or Miranda Bailey... oops.
> 
> I have no idea just how many of you Hunter x Hunter fans are also Grey's fans but I happen to be really into both (the first five seasons of Grey's Anatomy are my guilty rewatch pleasure) and it's no coincidence Togashi happens to like Shonda Rhimes' other show, _How to Get Away With Murder._ A doctor's intern year is just as cutthroat as the Hunter Exam in this universe. Get ready, Leorio.
> 
> I hope you can all forgive me for writing this because it's mostly self-indulgent and I had to make OCs or adopt OCs from my other original works... I didn't really want to disrupt the canon of HxH universe because I think Leorio deserves his own story while the others got to have their nen-training mini-arcs. I hope the sheer number of non-canon characters doesn't alienate anyone. Rest assured, shippy leopika stuff will come soon! I promise!
> 
> If you like this work and want to send me questions about it, comment below or send me an ask on [my Tumblr!](https://cornheck.tumblr.com/) I'm literally always in the mood for ask-spam, so please don't be shy. Please... send me asks :')


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